Eugene V. Debs and Jesus of Nazareth

M

m

'>^-

'L:-^

:^> ^o:,.

"iSm

[.'AS

%e

3 9004 01508510 0

■m

r55\

antr

Jesiusf of i^a^aretf)

^/

/

7)

Published by

WINNIPEG LABOR CHURCH

530 Main Street, Winnipeg

The Wallingford Press, 283 Kennedy St.

i

ug^UGENE DEBS, the American socialist, spent his Thanksgiving in ttbe
penitentiary, despite the many appeals to' the White House for his re-
lease. Here is his latest photograph, taken in the federal penitentiary at

A'rlatiia. ^ .

^ft^ffif

Debs' Speech to The Court

On Saturday morning, September 14, 1918, Eugene V.
Debs stood before Judge Westenhaver, in the United States
district court at Cleveland, Ohio, and delivered the following
address, one of the most eloquent efforts of his career. Debs
had been convicted by a jury on September 12 of having
violated the Espionage Act by making a speech before the
Socialist State Convention, at Canton, Ohio, June 16, 1918.
—Editor.

DISTRICT ATTORNEY WERTZ: If the Court please,
I move for the imposition of sentence.

JUDGE WESTENHAVER (to the clerk): You may
inquire if the defendant has anything to say.

THE CLERK: Eugene V. Debs, have you anything
further to say in your behalf before the Court passes sent-
ence upon you?

EUGENE V. DEBS: Your Honor, years ago I recog-
nized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my
mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of
earth. I said then, Isay now, that, while there is a lower
class, I am in it ; while there is a soul in prison, I am not
free.

If the Law under which I am convicted is a good Law,
then there is no reason why sentence should not be pro-
nounced upon me. I listened to all that was said in this
Court in support and justification of this Law, but my mind
remains unchanged. I look upon it as a despotic enactment
in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the
spirit of free institutions.

I have no fault to find with this court or with the trial.
Everything in connection with this case has been conducted
upon a dignified plane and in a respectful and decent spirit —
with just one exception. Your honor, my sainted mother
inspired me with a reverence for womanhood that amounts
to worship. I can think with disrespect of no woman; and
I can think with respect of no man who can. I resent the
manner in which the names of two noble women were
bandied with in this Court. The levity and the wantonness
in this instance were absolutely inexcusable. When I think
of what was said in this connection I feel that when I pass

1:10^^0^

4 EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH

a woman, even though it be a sister of the street, I should
take off my hat and apologize to her for being a man.

Your honor, I have stated in this Court that I am
opposed to the form of our present Government ; that I am
opposed to the social system in which we live; that I be-
lieved in the change of both — but by perfectly peaceable
and orderly means.

Let me call your attention to the fact, this morning,
that in this system 5 per cent, of our people own and con-
trol two-thirds of our wealth; 65 per cent, of the people,
embracing the working class that produces all wealth, have
but 5 per cent, to show for it.

Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At
14 I went to work in the railroad shops ; at 16 I was firing a
freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships,
all the privations, of that earlier day; and from that time
until now my heart has been with the working class. I could
have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to
prison. The choice has been dileberately made. I could not
have done otherwise. I have no regret.

In the struggle — the unceasing struggle — between the
toilers and producers and their exploiters I have tried, as
best I might, to serve those among whom I was born, with
whom I expect to share my lot until the end of my days.

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and
factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry
wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little
children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood
and in their early, tender years are seized in the remorse-
less grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dunge-
ons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are
being starved, body and soul. I can see them dwarfed, dis-
eased, stunted, their little lives broken, and their hopes
blasted, because in this high noon of our twentieth centwry
civilization money is still so much more important than
human life. Gold is god, and rules in the affairs of men.
The little girls — and there are a million of them in this
country — this, the most favored land beneath the bending
skies ; a land in which we have vast areas of rich and fertile
soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the
most marvellous productive machinery on earth, millions of
eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery
to produce an abundance for every man, woman and child —

EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH 5

and if there are still many millions of our people who are
victims of poverty, whose life is a ceaseless struggle all the
way from youth to age, until at last death comes to their
rescue and stills the aching heart, and lulls the victim to
dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty ; it can't
be charged to nature. It is due entirely to an outgrown
social system that ought to be abolished, not only in the
interest of the working class, but in a higher interest of all
humanity.

When I think of these little children — the girls that are
in the textile mills of all descriptions in the East, in the
cotton factories of the South ; when I think of them at work
when they ought to be at play or at school, when I think
that when they do grow up, if they live long enough to
approach the marriage state, they are unfit for it; their
nerves are worn out, their tissue is exhausted, their vitality
is spent. They have been fed to industry. Their lives have
been coined into gold. Their offspring are born tired. That
is why there are so many failures in our modern life.

Your Honor, the 5 per cent, of the people that I have
made reference to constitute that element that absolutely
rules our country. They privately own all our public neces-
sities. They wear no crowns; they wield no scepters; they
sit upon no thrones ; and yet they are our economic masters
and our political rulers. They control this Government and
all *of its institutions. They control the Courts.

And, Your Honor, if you will permit me, I wish to
make just one correction. It was stated here that I had
charged that all Federal Judges are crooks. The charge is
absolutely untrue. I did say that all Federal Judges are
appointed through the influence and power of the capitalist
class, and not the working class. If that statement is not
true, I am more than wilhng to retract it.

Of the 5 per cent, of our people wjio own and control all
the sources of wealth, all of the nation's industries, all of
the means of our common life, it is they who declare war;
it is they who make peace; it is they who control our des-
tiny. And, so long as this is true, we can make no just claim
to being a democratic Government — a self-governing people.

I believe. Your Honor, in common with all Socialists,
that this nation ought to own and control its industries. I
believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly
needed and used ought to be jointly owned; that industry,

6 EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH

the basis of life, instead of being the private property of
the few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the
common property of all, democratically administered in the
interest ot all.

John I). Rockefeller has today an income of $60,000,000
a year— $5,000,000 a month, $200,000 a day. He does not
produce a penny of it. I make no attack upon Mr. Rocke-
feller personally. I do not in the least dislike him. If he
were in need, and it were in my power to serve him, I should
serve him as gladly as I would any other human being. I
have no quarrel with Mr. Rockefeller personally, nor with
any other capitalist. I am simply opposing a social order in
which it is possible for one man who does absolutely noth-
ing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars, while milhons of men and women who work
all of the days of their lives secure barely enough for an
existence.

This order of things cannot always endure. I have
registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness
of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are
multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come
to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of
civiHzed life we must reorganize society upon a mutual and
co-operative basis; and to this end we have organized a
great economic and political movement that spreads over
the face of all the earth.

There are today upward of 60,000,000 Socialists — loyal,
devoted adherents to this cause, regardless of nationality,
race, creed, color or sex. They are all making common cause.
They are all spreading the propaganda of the new social
order. They are waiting, watching and working through all
the weary hours of the day and night. They are still in the
minority. They have learned how to be patient and abide
their time. They feel — they know, indeed — that the time
is coming, in spite of all opposition, all persecution, when
this emancipating gospel will spread among all the peoples,
and when this minority will become the triumphant major-
ity, and, sweeping into power, inaugurate the greatest
change in history.

In that day we will have the universal comrrtonwealth —
not the destruction of the nation, but, on the contrary, the
harmonious co-operation of every nation with every other
nation on earth. In that day war will curse this earth no
more.

EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH 7

I have been accused, Your Honor, of being an enemy of
the soldier. I hope I am laying no flattering unction to my
soul when I say that I don't beheve the soldier has a more
sympathetic friend than I am. If I had my way, there would
be no soldier. But I realize the sacrifices they are making,
Your Honor. I can think of them. I can feel for them. 1
can sympathize with them. That is one of the reasons why
I have been doing what little has been in my power to
bring about a condition of affairs in this country worthy of
the sacrifices they have made and that they are now making
in its behalf.

Your Honor, in a local paper, yesterday, there was some
editorial exultation about my prospective imprisonment. I
do not resent it in the least. I can understand it perfectly.
In the same paper there appears an editorial, this morning,
that has in it a hint of the wrong to which I have been try-
ing to call attention. (Reading) : "A Senator of the United
States receives a salary of $7,500 — $45,000 for the six years
for which he is elected. One of the candidates for Senator
from a State adjoining Ohio is reported to have spent
through his committee $150,000 to secure the nomination.
For advertising he spent $35,000; for printing, $30,000;
for travelling expenses, $10,000, and the rest in ways known
to political managers."

"The theory is that public office is as open to a poor
man as to a rich man. One may easily imagine, however,
how slight a chance one of ordinary resources would have
in a contest against this man, who was willing to spend more
than three times his six years' salary merely to secure
nomination. Were these conditions to hold in every State,
the Senate would soon become again what it was once held
to be — a rich man's club."

"Campaign expenditures have been the subject of much
restrictive legislation in recent years, but it has not always
reached the mark. The authors of primary reform have
accomplished some of the things they set out to do, but
they have not yet taken the bank roll out of politics."

They never will take it out of politics — they never can
take it out of politics — in this system.

Your Honor, I wish to make acknowledgment of my
thanks to the counsel for the defense. They have not only
defended me with exceptional legal ability, but with a per-
sonal attachment and devotion of which I am deeply sensible,
and which I can never forget.

8 EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH

Your Honor, I ask no mercy. I plead for no immunity.
I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more
clearly comprehend than now the great struggle between
the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other
the rising hosts of freedom.

I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The
people are awakening. In due course of time they will come
to their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for
relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the
Southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed
ocean. As the midnight approaches, the Southern cross
begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places,
and, with starry finger-points, the Almighty marks the
passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and, though
no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that
the midnight is passing — that relief and rest are close at
hand.

Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the
cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh
with the morning.

He is true to God who is true to man. Wherever wrong
is done to the humblest and the weakest 'neath the all-
beholding sun, that wrong is also done to us ; and they are
slaves most base whose love of right is for themselves and
not for all the race.

Your Honor, I thank you, and I thank all of this Court
for their courtesy, for their kindness, which I shall remem-
ber always.

I am prepared to receive your sentence.

The Court then sentenced Eugene V. Debs to 10 years'
imprisonment at the West Virginia State Penitentiary, at
Moundsville, the Federal Prison at Atlanta, Ga., being too
crowded to receive him.

—THE CALL MAGAZINE.

EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH

Jesus The Supreme Leader

(By EUGENE V. DEBS)

It matters little whether Jesus was born at Nazareth or
Bethlehem. The accounts conflict, but the point is of no
consequence.

It is of consequence, however, that he was born in a
stable and cradled in a manger. This fact of itself, about
which there is no question, certifies conclusively the pro-
letarian character of Jesus Christ. Had his parents been
other than poor working people — money-changers, usurers,
merchants, lawyers, scribes, priests or other parasites —
he would not have been delivered from his mother's womb
on a bed of straw in a stable among asses and other animals.

Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as every
other babe ever born into the world. He was of miraculous
origin, the same as all the rest of mankind. The scriptural
account of his ''immaculate conception" is a beautiful myth,
but scarcely more of a miracle than the conception of all
other babies.

Jesus was not divine because he was less human than
his fellow-men, but for the opposite reason, that he was
supremely human, and it is this of which his divinity con-
sists, the fullness and perfection of him as an intellectual,
moral and spiritual human being.

The chronicles of his time and of later days are filled
with contradictory and absurd stories about him, and he
has been disfigured and distorted by cunning priests to
serve their knavish ends, and by ignorant idolaters to give
godly sanction to their blind bigotry and savage supersti-
tion, but there is no impenetrable myth surrounding the
personality of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary being
or an allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and others have
shown us, a flesh and blood man in the fullness of his match-
less powers and the completeness of his transcendent con-
secration.

To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and per-
vasive as a historic character as John Brown, Abraham

10 EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH

Lincoln or Karl Marx. He has persisted, in spite of 2,000
years of theological emasculation to destroy his revolution-
ary personality, and is today the greatest moral force in
the world.

The vain attempt persisted in through 20 centuries of
ruling class interpolation, interpretation and falsification to
make Jesus appear the divinely commissioned conservator
of the peace and soother of the oppressed, instead of the
master proletarian revolutionist and sower of the social
whirlwmd — the vain attempt to prostitute the name and
teachings and example of the martyred Christ to the power
of Mammon, the very power which had murdered him in
cold blood, vindicates his transcendent genius and proclaims
the immortality of his work.

Nothing is known of Jesus Christ as a lad except that
at 12 his parents took him to Jerusalem, where he con-
founded the learned doctors by the questions he asked them.
We have no knowledge as to what these questions were,
but taking his lowly birth, his poverty and suffering into
account, in contrast with the riches of Jerusalem which
now dazzled his vision, and in the light of his subsequent
career, we are not left to conjecture as to the nature of the
interrogation to which the inquisitive lad subjected the
smug doctors in the temple.

There are but meagre accounts of the doings of Jesus
until at a trifle over 30 he entered upon his public "ministry"
and began the campaign of agitation and revolt he had been
planning and dreaming through all the years of his yearn-
ing and burning adolescence. He was of the working class
and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood to the very hour
of his death. He hated and denounced the rich and cruel
exploiter as passionately as he loved and sympathized with
his poor and suffering victims.

''1 speak not of you all. I know whom I have chosen,"
was his class-conscious announcement to his disciples, all
of whom were of the proletariat; not an exploiter or desir-
able citizen among them. No, not one! It was a working
class movement he was organizing and a working class revo-
lution he was preparing the way for.

"A new commandment I give unto you: That ye love
one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one an-
other." This was the pith and core of all his pleading, all
his preaching, and all his teaching — love one another, be

EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH 11

brethren, make common cause, stand together, ye who labor
to enrich the parasites and are yourselves in chains, and ye
shall be free !

These words were addressed by Jesus, not to the money-
changers, the scribes and pharisees, the rich and respect-
able, but to the ragged undesirables of his own enslaved
and suffering class. This appeal was to their class spirit,
their class loyalty and their class solidarity.

Centuries later Karl Marx embodies the appeal in his
famous manifesto and today it blazes forth in letters of fire
as the watchword of the world-wide revolution : "Workers of
all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your
chains. You have a world to gain."

During the brief span of these years, embracing the
whole period of his active life, from the time he began to
stir up the people until *'the scarlet robe and crown of thorns
were put on him and he was crucified between two thieves,"
Jesus devoted all his time and all his matchless ability and
energies to the suffering poor, and it would have been pass-
ing strange if they had not **heard him gladly."

He himself had no fixed abode, and like the wretched,
motley throng to whom he preached and poured out his
great and loving heart, he was a poor wanderer on the face
of the earth and "had nowhere to lay his head."

Pure communism was the economic and social gospel
preached by Jesus Christ, and every act and utterance which
may properly be ascribed to him conclusively affirms it.
Private property was to his elevated mind and exalted soul
a sacrilege and a horror; an insult to God and a crime
against man.

The economic basis of his doctrine of brotherhood and
love is clearly demonstrated in the fact that under his
leadership and teaching all his disciples "sold their posses-
sions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man
had need," and that they "had all things in common."

"And they, continuing with one accord in the temple,
and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat
with gladness and singleness of heart."

This was the beginning of the mighty movement Jesus
had launched for the overthrow of the empire of the Caesars
and the emancipation of the crushed and miserable masses
from the bestial misrule of the Roman tyrants.

12 EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH

It was, above all, a working class movement and was
conceived and brought forth for no other purpose than to
destroy class rule and set up the common people as the sole
and rightful inheritors of the earth.

"Happy are the lowly, for they shall inherit the earth."

Three short years of agitation by the incomparable
Jesus was sufficient to stamp the proletarian movement he
had inaugurated as the most formidable and portentous
revolution in the annals of time. The ill-fated author could
not long survive his stupendous mischief. The aim and
inevitable outcome of this madman's teaching and agitation
was too clearly manifest to longer admit of doubt.

The sodden lords of misrule trembled in their stolen
finery, and then the word went forth that they must "get"
the vagabond who had stirred up the people against them.
The prototypes of Peabody. McPartland, Harry Orchard et
al were all ready for their base and treacherous perform-
ance and their 30 pieces of blood-stained silver. The priest
of the Mammon worshippers gave it out that the Nazarene
was spreading a false religion and that his pernicious teach-
ings would corrupt the people, destroy the church, uproot
the old faith, disrupt the family, break up the home and
overthrow society.

The lineal descendants of Caiaphas and Judas and the
m.oney-changers and pharisees of old are still parroting the
same miserable falsehood to serve the same miserable ends,
the only difference being that the brood of pious perverts
now practice their degeneracy in the name of Christ they
betrayed and sold into crucifixion 20 centuries ago.

Jesus, after the most farcial trial and the most shock-
ing travesty upon justice, \vas spiked to the cross at the
gates of Jerusalem, and his followers were subjected to per-
secution, torture, exile and death. The movement he had
inaugurated, fired by his unconquerable revolutionary spirit,
persisted, however, through fire and slaughter, for three
centuries and until the master class, realizing the futility
of their efforts to stamp it out, basely betrayed it by pre-
tending conversion to its teachings and reverence for its
murdered founder, and from that time forth Christianity
became the religion, so-called, of the pagan ruling class,
and the dead Christ was metamorphosed from the master
revolutionist who was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his
class, into the pious abstraction, the harmless theological

EUGENE V. DEBS AND JESUS OF NAZARETH 13

divinity who died that John Jierpont Morgan could be
^'washed in the blood of the lamb," and countless genera-
tions of betrayed and deluded slaves kept blinded by super-
stition and content in their poverty and degradation.

Jesus was the grandest and loftiest of human souls —
sun-crowned and God-inspired; a full-statured man, red-
blooded and lion-hearted, yet sweet and gentle as the noble
mother who had given him birth.

He has the majesty and poise of a God, the prophetic
vision of a seer, the great, loving heart of a woman, and
the unaffected innocence and simplicity of a child.

This was and is the martyred Christ of the working
class, the inspired evangel of the down-trodden masses, the
world's supreme revolutionary leader, whose love for the
poor and the children of the poor hallowed all the days of
his consecrated life, lighted up and made forever holy the
dark tragedy of his death, and gave to the age his divine
inspiration and his deathless name.

—THE CALL MAGAZINE,

Christmas Number, 1917.

^:

■'i ■-' -^ir

1^

'>. .^,.

#.

^1

-#>

?firi